How 21st Century Online Collaborative Tools, Networks, and Skills are Re-invigorating the field of Music Education.

NOTE: "I am excited to announce that Dr. Joe Pisano has officially joined iSchoolBand as the director of our advisory board.  He will be working with several thought leaders in music education to make sure that iSchoolBand always stays relevant and powerful.  This article will give you some insight into his level of expertise and just why we chose him to lead up the board.  Dr. Pisano shares a similar vision for a simplified music education experience, and we are proud to have him on board!  Find out more about him and his contributions to music education at MusTech.Net.

And now, without further delay...I am pleased to present Dr. Joe Pisano's fantastic article on the future of music education." - Chris Purifoy (President & Co-founder of iSchoolBand)
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Many Music Educators are finding a new found energy for their field and a resurgence of energy for their own creativity by tapping into the wealth of Professional Development tools that are being utilized online and new colleagues to share ideas with via the Internet.    Music teachers, by their very nature, are creative people; however many of them are now viewing themselves as trapped within the “four walls” of their schools and “starving” for outside contact.  They are increasingly feeling the pressure of the changing school priorities and the educational environment.   These types of high-pressure situations and scenarios often, and unfortunately, lead to a premature draining of energies and creative drive for many of the music teachers...

Because much of the training provided from the schools for the teachers is intended for the general teaching populace, very little relevant or “music-specific” professional development training is passed on or available to the music faculty.   In order to find these types of music-specific developmental opportunities, music teachers typically find ways to attend regional or state music conferences to obtain pertinent information about their discipline and to recharge themselves.  These same conferences re-invigorate them with the energy created by being with like-minded professionals and the experience of watching great music performances by the students of peer institutions.     Unfortunately, the current state of school finances has forced many districts to cut back on many of these opportunities for all the teachers, and consequently, these cutbacks have been magnified for those teaching in the arts and “special education” areas.    These cutbacks not only hurt the programs, they also stifle many (and sometimes any) professional development opportunities available to the music teachers.  In many cases, professional development for the teachers is cut in favor of providing a desperately needed classroom item –arguably this is a no win outcome.

Having our music educators attenuated to the students that the 21st Century is brining into the classrooms is more important then ever.  Never before in the history of education has the landscape of how students learn, collaborate, and communicate changed so quickly.   Students are now coming into the classroom with a completely different “natural” skill set - a skill set that many educators simply don’t understand.   Students today are “connected” in ways that one couldn’t dream of in 2005, yet alone ten or twenty years earlier.   Teachers that have remained dormant to this new deluge of communication, multimedia usage, and connectivity are now finding themselves in the middle of a “new world” and they aren’t sure why and how they got there.

Because of the commonality of media-rich technologies that are now part of the “average” student’s world, uninformed music teachers are often bewildered by questions asked to them by “non-music” students that pertain to media composition, music production, or audio recording.  Seemingly, to many music teachers, the “non-music students” are now able to create musical things without the same fundamental knowledge that musicians have shared for millennia and it makes many music teachers very uneasy.  Many of the teachers still look at these “non music students” as something not to be bothered with rather than figure out ways to understand where they are at musically and find ways to educate them with their expertise.  Music and creativity is now more important to the daily lives of ALL students than it has ever been and so is the role of the music teacher.

Thankfully, the same technologies that are now seemingly so “foreign” to so many teachers are also providing accessible paths for them break out and go beyond the “four walls” of their teaching environment.  Once these new paths are taken, a new world of personalized Professional Development opportunities appears.   

Many teachers are now asking themselves and others how they are supposed to go about getting training on these new technologies and where are the opportunities for them to learn them?  In this “plugged in world”, the answer is starring at them every time they connect to the Internet -start searching for them online.  The Internet is the modern-day equivalent of the ancient oracle and it’s infinitely more accurate and useful.

In the “old days”, people formed their own “networks of learning” by face-face discussion and by seeking out physical places of learning such as academic schools, trade schools, or physically finding mentors for the acquisition of knowledge.   This “network of learning” certainly would include written books and repositories of information such as libraries.   Today, the main difference between the 21st century model of “networks of learning” and that of the past are the tools that are used to obtain and acquire knowledge.  While the “old days” approach to making networks is still used, there are also a number of new tools that simply were not available to prior to the 21st century.  With the advent of computer stored information (databases) and the vehicles that the Internet, Broadband transfer speeds, syndication, and Web 2.0 technologies provide, society is now able to enjoy unprecedented opportunities for the learning, collaborating, creating, and sharing information.

Even though “networks of learning” have always been around, related 21st century terms are appearing such as PLNs (Personal or Professional Learning Networks), PLEs (Personal Learning Environments), PLCs (Personal/Professional Learning Communities), and SMs and SNs (Social Media and Social Networks respectively).  These acronyms are some of the ones being used to describe the new phenomena of social collaboration and Professional Development that is taking place on the World Wide Web.   For Music Teachers, access to Professional Development has never been easier or more widely available.  

Over the past five years, in addition to the myriad of static music-related Websites by music-related organizations and companies, hundreds of music education bloggers have appeared online.  Prior to the advent of these music bloggers, public discussion was limited to a few forums behind member-only sites and a hodge-podge of list-servs.  With the arrival of the music bloggers, online discussion and information about the field of music increased and a large amount of publically viewable teaching expertise began to appear on the Web.  

In 2008, a year long initiative was launched to encourage more music teachers to write about their experiences through blogging and thus generate more widely available information about music education.  This initiative was very successful and was known as the ME Blogger project.  Higher educational institutions such as the Berklee College of Music have adopted the concept of blogging in education and have provided an incredible source of growing information about Music, Education, and Technology through its Berkleemusic Blog Network.   With the development of WordPress, any teacher can start a professional, classroom, or personal blog for free and will be amazed by how simple the platform is to operate.

The advent of the “Music Education Blogger” has led the music community to an increased understanding of the importance of the role of RSS feeds with regard to dispersing information.   By using simple feed readers such as Google Reader or Blogbridge to subscribe to information once it’s found, information will now flow to the subscriber and never have to be “found” again.  Perhaps, even more useful, collections of RSS feeds can be bundled into one super-feed, known as an OPML file, and the possibilities for information diaspora is compounded.  

The “Project OPML-Educators of Music” (PO-EM) is a great example of a collection of RSS feeds about Music Education in one OPML file.   An example of the power of harnessing this type of information and using it online may be seen at the Website MusicEdNews.com.  This site aggregates all of the RSS feeds in the PO-EM file and displays all the RSS information, from all the sites, publicly via the Website.

In the past couple of years, Music Education PLN communities have appeared on almost every viable Social Media Site.  There are also hybrid- productivity/Social-Networking applications that are incorporating Social-Media capabilities for students, parents, and administrators with daily Music Administration tasks such as iSchoolBand.  Facebook groups like the “Online Music Education group” and the Grou.ps site Music Techie Teachers are now seeming to “pop-up” almost everywhere online.

Arguably, the online tool where the largest explosion of collaboration and professional development among music teachers is happening is with Twitter.  With the advent of the Twitter Music Education Chat which happens on every Monday Night at 12AM/GMT, a deluge of online music education collaboration and discussion has occurred among the participants.   Music teachers from across the globe are now collaborating and forming new information via Twitter and it is being shared via blogs, websites, podcasts, and on wikis across the Internet. 

Every Music Education Chat that takes place on Twitter is being logged and is available for data-mining for future music knowledge seekers.  Music educators seeking to get involved in the Twitter conversation and are looking to create an instant network of active Music Educators to “follow” need look no further than the official Twitter Music Educators list provided by MusTech.Net.

For those not able to physically make it to regional, state/province, or national conferences, a new type of conference journalism has emerged known as “live tweeting” or “live blogging”.   This concept becomes realized by the actual attendees of the conferences.  When they attend a conference session, they deliver “live” text updates of the experience via services such as Twitter, Google Buzz, or Live Blogging them.  A recent example of this was when a team of undergraduate and graduate music students “live blogged” the majority of the MENC National Conference held this year in June at Washington D.C.  These students provided an invaluable information service to those that were not able to attend physically but could attend by “virtual” means.

There are also two new resources that are significant Professional Development Online resources for Music Educators that are being “rolled out” mid and late 2010 online.  The first is the Music Educator’s Professional Learning Network (MusicPLN.org / MPLN).   The MPLN is a free-to-use, social network specifically for Music Educators and Pre-Service teachers that combines many of the existing Social Networks such as Twitter and Facebook into one easy-to-use collaborative Website.  

Lastly, SoundTree is providing the first-of-a-kind online Professional Development opportunity for Music Educators that has been named: METOS (Music, Education, and Technology Online Summit).   METOS will literally be a “virtual conference” with significant and well-known Educators of Music presenting virtual clinics.  Admission to this online opportunity for Music Educators is free.

Many times, taking the first step into something new is, indeed, the hardest.   Thankfully, the very technologies that, at first glance, seem to be so intimidating to many are, in fact, able to be used to help learn the very technologies themselves.   The technologies available to Music Educators today allow them and their students to explore creativity in ways never before possible and provide professional development opportunities on a twenty-four hour basis.   Music Educators must take the time to obtain some level of fluency with this new paradigm so that they can learn how to better connect with their students, better connect with their peers, expand their own knowledge though the new avenues professional development available and take advantage of the new-style of networking resources that will help them to become better teachers and musicians.  


ABOUT DR. JOSEPH PISANO

Dr. Joseph Pisano is the Associate Chair of Music at Grove City College located in Grove City, PA. At Grove City, he is an Associate Professor of Music and Music Technology and the Associate Director of Bands. He also serves as the Music Education Guide Writer/Editor for In-Tune Monthly Magazine. He is an active ensemble conductor, adjudicator, jazz trumpeter, author, and fine arts advocate. He is also well known for his online music education initiatives through his many Websites.  Find him on Twitter: @pisanojm and at http://jpisano.com